Category: Uncategorized

Thank you so much for reporting bugs in our Picard 2.0.0beta2 release. We fixed most of the critical bugs that you guys and gals reported. You can find the beta3 release with the fixes here – Picard 2.0.0.beta3

If you have been following our Picard related blogs, you will know that we decided to release a new stable version of Picard before the beginning of the summer.

To help us, advanced users, translators and developers are encouraged to:

Note – If any of you are seasoned Windows/macOS devs and have experience with PyInstaller, we need some help with PICARD-1216 and PICARD-1217. We also need some help with code signing Picard for OSX. Hit us up on #metabrainz on freenode for more information. We will be very grateful for any help that you may offer!

Thank you so much for reporting bugs in our Picard 2.0.0beta1 release. We fixed most of the critical bugs that you guys and gals reported. You can find the beta2 release with the fixes here – Picard 2.0.0.beta2

If you have been following our Picard related blogs, you will know that we decided to release a new stable version of Picard before the beginning of the summer.

To help us, advanced users, translators and developers are encouraged to:

Note – If any of you are seasoned Windows/macOS devs and have experience with PyInstaller, we need some help with PICARD-1216 and PICARD-1217. We also need some help with code signing Picard for OSX. Hit us up on #metabrainz on freenode for more information. We will be very grateful for any help that you may offer!

MetaBrainz sponsored Music Hack Day London 2014 and we had agreed to provide a prize for one of the winners. We thought that Thomas Bronte from MuseScore had the best hack and offered him a choice of a few prizes that were appropriate for hack day winners. Thomas declined and instead asked if he could pen a guest blog entry on our blog when they were ready to reveal their new project. We immediately agreed to do that, since open source projects need to stick together and help each other out. Finally, this is the blog post that Thomas and crew penned—read on to find out about their excellent new project!

OpenScore is a new crowdsourcing initiative to digitise classical sheet music by composers whose works are in the public domain, such as Mozart and Beethoven. Massive crowdsourced projects like Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg and OpenStreetMap (not to mention MusicBrainz!) have done wonders for the democratisation of knowledge, putting information and power in the hands of ordinary people. With OpenScore, we want to do the same for music.

OpenScore’s aim is to transform history’s most influential pieces from paper music into interactive digital scores, which you can listen to, edit, and share. This will be of huge benefit to orchestras, choirs, ensembles, and individuals looking for materials from which to practise music, but it doesn’t end there! All OpenScore sheet music editions will be freely distributed under Creative Commons Zero (CC0). This means there are no restrictive copyright terms, so everyone will be free to use the files for any purpose. We want to maximize the benefit to music education and research, and inspire composers and arrangers to produce new content.

The advantages of digital sheet music are huge. OpenScore Editions will be available in the popular MusicXML format which can be read by most music notation programs. The files can also be parsed by software tools for research and analysis, and can even converted to Braille notation for blind musicians. Digital scores can also be easily adapted into non-standard forms of notation for use in education, accessibility, or gaming; or turned into artistic visualisations. The works will be stored in an online database, accessible via a REST API. Each work will be associated with its composer’s MusicBrainz and WikiData IDs to enable cross referencing with existing online content.

OpenScore is the result of a partnership between two of the largest online sheet music communities: MuseScore and IMSLP. Since 2006 the IMSLP community has been searching for out-of-copyright musical editions, scanning and uploading them to create one of the world’s largest online archives of public domain sheet music in PDF format. MuseScore has a dedicated community of millions of people around the world, who use MuseScore’s website and open source notation software to compose, arrange, practise and share digital sheet music. OpenScore will harness the power of these communities to transcribe the IMSLP editions, which are currently just pictures of pages, into interactive digital scores by typing them up, one note at a time, into MuseScore’s sheet music editor.

OpenScore starts with a Kickstarter campaign to liberate 100 of the greatest classical pieces. This will help us to start developing the necessary systems to scale up to liberating all public domain music. Backers can help pick the pieces to be liberated, so if you love classical music and you wish to liberate a composer or a specific work, make sure you support the Kickstarter campaign and help spread the word about OpenScore and digital sheet music!

Proceed with replication as normal, either via cron, or by running ./admin/replication/LoadReplicationChanges

You can also re-import from dump 20170605-031203 or later, and replicate from there. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience.

The issue here was caused by a bug in our alias merge code that interacted strangely with dbmirror. Since that code went untouched for years, the trigger for this issue must have been extremely rare. I’ve put in place a fix for the merge logic to ensure it doesn’t happen there again, and am investigating dbmirror’s behavior to see why it didn’t sequence the updates correctly.

We have picked our set of tickets and the date for our May 2017 schema change release: May, 15th 2017. This will be a fairly standard and minor schema change release — we’re only tackling 3 tickets that affect downstream users and no other infrastructure changes.

MBS-8393: “Extend dynamic attributes to all entities” Currently our works have the concept of additional attributes which allows the community to decide which sorts of new attributes to apply to a work. (e.g. catalog numbers, rhythmic structures, etc) This ticket will implement these attributes to all of our entities. Also, this ticket will not change any of the existing database tables, it will only add new tables.

MBS-5452: “Support multiple lyric language values for works” Currently only one language or the special case “multiple languages” may be used to identify the language used in lyrics. This ticket allows more than one language to be specified for lyrics of a work.

The following tickets are special cases — they will not really affect our downstream users who do not have edit data loaded into their system. We are only including this change at the schema change release time in order to bring some older replicated systems up to date. If you do not use the edit data, then please ignore these tickets.

MBS-9271: “Prevent usernames from being reused” This ticket does not change the schema, but for sake of minimizing downstream disruption, we’re going to carry out this ticket during the schema change.

MBS-9274: “Fix the edit_note_idx_post_time_edit index in older setups to handle NULL post_time” This ticket fixes an SQL index on an edit related table.

MBS-9273: “Fix the a_ins_edit_note function in older setups to not populate edit_note_recipient for own notes” This ticket also fixes an SQL index on an edit related table.

This is it — really minor this time around. If you have any questions, feel free to post them in the comments or on the tickets themselves.

I’m very happy to announce that we have a brand new Supporter Catalyst on our team. Elizabeth Bigger, AKA Quesito, joined our team at the beginning of the year and is now coming up to speed.

Her duties include making contact with any supporters who sign up on the MetaBrainz site and to sort out any questions they may have working with such a quirky organization like MetaBrainz. She’ll also be reaching out to established customers to make sure that they are on the right support level and that things are working smoothly for our supporters.

I anticipate her also helping out with other tasks such as putting on our annual summit and other events we may hold in our office in Barcelona.